“That’s a helluva a laugh you’ve got there.”
“I know. My ex says it’s one of the reasons he asked for a divorce. He couldn’t take it anymore.”
“I like it. I might even like your name if I knew it.”
Now she definitely was blushing. “Casey. People call me Casey.”
“But that’s not your name?”
“Not nearly,” she said, ducking her head and wrapping her arms around the shoulders of her red leather jacket. “God, it’s cold out here.”
“It is, but you’re not changing subjects that easy.”
We both laughed at that. But she scrunched her lips closed and shook her head no at me like a little girl.
“So, you’re not gonna tell me your name, huh?”
“Not tonight,” she said.
I offered her my right hand. “Well, I’m Gus Murphy.”
Her hand fit comfortably in mine. It was warm and soft, but not too soft. It was a hand that worked for a living.
Casey looked me directly in the eyes. “I know who you are.”
“Do you?”
“People talk.”
She was lovely. Her hair was coal black and parted on the left. It was long, too, and fell over her shoulders as it pleased. She had an angular jawline and a willful chin. And when she wasn’t being shy, her smile was bright and alive. Her lips weren’t overly pouty or thick, but they had great curves to them.
“What do you know about me, Casey whose name isn’t Casey?”
“You were a cop and . . .”
There it was, that look. She knew about John. I wasn’t in the mood for the usual awkwardness nor was I in the mood to be unkind. Being here with her had changed my frame of mind.
“It’s okay,” I said, touching her cheek. Somehow I knew it would be okay for me to do that. “It’s not good to pretend.”
When she didn’t apologize, I swear I almost kissed her. I found the thought of kissing her suddenly a pleasant idea, but I kept it as just that, a pleasant thought.
“I’ve wanted to talk to you for a long time, Gus, but I could never work up the nerve before tonight. It never seemed like you would want to talk. This isn’t coming out right. It’s not that I thought you wouldn’t want to talk to me. What I’m saying is that you always seemed like you were closed.”
“I was closed,” I said, realizing my hand was still pressed to her cheek. I took it away, but not quickly. “What did you want to talk about?”
“The truth?”
“It’s usually a good place to start.”
“Dinner,” she said.
I was confused. “What about dinner?”
She laughed that goofy laugh again and I was even more confused.
“What?”
“I’ve wanted you to ask me that question for months.”
“What about dinner?” I repeated it in my head and aloud, trying to understand. Then, “Oh, now I understand.”
“You’re smiling, Gus.”
“Am I? I don’t smile much anymore.”
“You should. It suits you. You’re very handsome when you smile.”
“Thanks.”
She turned her palms up. “Well?”
“Well what?”
Casey smiled. “What about dinner?”
“We better stop this or it’s going to turn into a version of ‘Who’s on first?’”
“What?”
“No, he’s on second.”
“Who is?”
“Never mind.” I laughed, shaking my head at her. “Would you like to go to dinner sometime?”
“Very much.”
“Listen, Casey . . . I’m not sure I’ll be very good company.”
“Nothing is sure.”
I thought of my son and said, “You’re right about that. Nothing is.”
“What’s your number?”
I pointed at the hotel. “Call the hotel and ask for me.” Then I stopped being mysterious and gave her my cell number. “My schedule is kind of screwy, but—”
“You already trying to back out on me?” She wagged a finger.
I shook my head. “Scout’s honor. C’mon, I’ll walk you back to the club.”
“No,” she said, smiling. “I don’t think so. I’ve got what I came for.”
“Your car, then.”
Casey threw a thumb over her shoulder at the old blue Honda Civic behind her. “You already have.” She put her hands on my shoulders, got on her toes, and kissed me softly on my cheek. “I’ll call in a couple of days.”
Stunned, I watched her get into her car and drive off. As her taillights turned into small red specks and then disappeared, I thought of all the questions I should have asked her, of all the warnings about me I should have given her. But it was too late now. As I turned to limp back to the club, I noticed that neither my leg nor arm hurt quite as much as they had only fifteen minutes before. Then, about four strides short of where I would’ve made the turn around the corner to the Full Flaps, something else came out of the darkness at me. Something cold and hard and far more deadly than Casey’s voice. I stopped in my tracks. The feel of gunmetal against your neck will do that to you—stop you from moving. Stop the world from turning.
Before I could react, two massive, powerful hands clutched my elbows and squeezed my arms together behind me. Another hand, the free hand of the man pressing the gun to my neck, reached under my jacket and removed my old service weapon from the holster on my right hip. Suddenly, I was being moved along toward the space between a parked cargo van and a black Escalade, my feet barely touching the ground beneath them. I was a dead man. I smiled at the absurdity of it, for there had been so many times during the last two years I wouldn’t have cared. That I would have relished an end to all the pain and constant grief. It was different now. Was it as simple as having met a woman other than Annie whose lips I found I wanted to kiss? Was it that Tommy Delcamino’s murder had given me a sense of purpose beyond mourning my loss? I couldn’t say. All I knew was that I desperately wanted to see the sun rise again.
18
(FRIDAY NIGHT)
I didn’t know about the guy pressing the gun to my neck. I didn’t have to. The thing in his hand had bullets and went bang. I wouldn’t hear the bang . . . or would I? I would find out soon enough. I knew all I needed to know about the other guy, the one squeezing the life out of my arms. He was country strong. I wasn’t exactly a small man and he was pushing me along to a spot between a black Escalade and a van as if I were made out of papier-mâché. I didn’t have a whole lot of options besides stalling and begging. I was willing to stall. I figured if I stalled long enough, my guys from the club would come looking for me. If that didn’t work, I guessed I was fucked. I could envision myself begging for Krissy’s life. For Annie’s, too, in spite of everything. But not for my own life, no. The last two years had left me with precious little pride and I planned to hold on to whatever small bits of it remained in me even if it meant taking it to the grave.
As we approached the back bumper of the Escalade, I said as calmly as I could manage, “You guys know I’m Suffolk PD, right? You kill a cop and you’re gonna do the hardest kinda time there is to do and it will be for the rest of your lives. And that’s only if my friends don’t pay someone to stick a shiv in your neck. Maybe you should think about that before you do something you can’t undo.”
“Shut your damn mouth, chump,” whispered the man holding the gun to my neck. “Shut it and keep your white cracker ass movin’.” Although he spoke in a whisper, there was a familiar quality to his voice. I was too preoccupied to place it.
I had sweat-soaked through my shirt by the time we came to a stop between the van and the Caddy. Then the gun was off my neck. My arms were free, but I knew the man who’d pushed me here was close behind me. I could hear him breathing. Feel him the
re. My arm and leg were aching badly, my heart pumping blood as hard as it could. There was just enough ambient light for me to see an African-American man standing in front of me. He was twenty-five, if that, with a face like a cliff wall and about as welcoming. He was much smaller than me, but the Beretta he had pointed at my chest more than made up for that. Still, if I was going to make a move, it had to be soon. My arms were free and the guy with the gun was standing a little closer to me than he should have been. He seemed to have read my mind.
He shook his head at me in disappointment. “Nah, man, don’t even be thinkin’ ’bout that. Don’t be stupid, now.” He looked past me, over my shoulder, and said, “Okay, Antwone, pat his ass down and make sure he only had the one piece on him.”
Before I could blink, the strong man behind me was patting me down.
“He clean.” Antwone’s voice was deep as a moonless night. “Whatchu wan’ me to do with him, Jamal?”
I looked over my shoulder, slowly, to take a peek at Antwone. I wanted to see the man who had handled me with such ease. He was massive. I wasn’t sure how he’d even fit into such a tight space. One thing was for sure, if I wanted to run, there was no room for me to get past him.
Jamal shook his head at Antwone. Then the dome light popped on in the Escalade. Jamal stepped back, opening the rear passenger door with his free hand. Antwone put his hand on my shoulder to discourage me from getting any bright ideas.
An elegant-looking black man in his late twenties—head shaved, a gold, diamond-encrusted hoop earring thick as a wedding band dangling from his left ear—stepped out of the Escalade and came very close to me. Jamal closed the door behind him. The man staring at me with cruel brown eyes cool enough to lower the temperature stood about six feet tall. He was lean and moved like a big cat. He wore a camel-colored coat over a few thousand bucks’ worth of pinstriped navy wool. His shirt was white, the collar open, but stiffly ironed so that it dared not move without permission. There was a tasteful gold rope chain—thick, but not clownish—around his neck. He was handsome in a hard way. A fair amount of scar tissue had built up his brow and around the corners of his eyes. His nose was flatter than it should have been and didn’t look like there was much cartilage beneath its rich black skin. I didn’t pay any mind to the fancy clothes and the elegance. His presence alone was more intimidating than the Beretta in Jamal’s hand.
“Give me and the gentleman here a minute to get acquainted, yo.”
His tone was pleasant enough, but I gave that about as much weight as the rest of his artifice. His eyes told me everything about him I needed to know.
Jamal didn’t like it. “But you—”
“Nah, Jamal, ain’t no thing. We cool. Ain’t that right, Gus?” he said more than asked, patting my left arm, then grabbing my forearm. His grasp was nearly as powerful as Antwone’s.
“As cool as the weather,” I said.
“See, Jamal, I tol’ you Mr. Murphy here was a smart man. He know which way is up and it’s for damn sure he know which way is down.”
I nodded that I did.
He let go of my arm. “Now, Jamal, you and Antwone go over there and let us be. The grown-ups got to talk.”
Jamal backed up and walked around the front of the Escalade, along the driver’s side, and wound up behind Antwone. I turned to see them back away several feet, but not far enough for me to make a run for it or to feel secure. I turned back to the big cat.
“You know my name. And you are . . . ?”
“Nah, that ain’t the way this gonna play, yo.”
“How about you telling me what this is. Then we can worry about how it’ll play.”
He laughed. It had nothing to do with good humor. “You think I’m fuckin’ around witch y’all? You wan’ me bring my boys back over here?”
I shrugged. “If you wanted to hurt me, I’d already be hurt.”
“Or worse.”
“Or worse.”
He laughed again, which I found as comforting as a glass splinter. His eyes softened a little. “Y’all got some cojones on you, man. I give you that.” The softness vanished. “But your balls ain’t at issue, yo. Y’all got something that belongs to me.”
Oddly, the minute he said that, it hit me. I knew where I’d heard Jamal’s voice before. He’d been screaming at someone, presumably Antwone, not to shoot me. They’d killed Tommy.
“Motherfucker,” I said to myself. Apparently not.
My elegant friend heard it, too, and with lightning-fast movements, he stuck a Sig into the fleshy part of my neck. “What the fuck you call me?”
“I didn’t call you anything,” I said, my voice choked by the muzzle of his gun.
“Then what?”
“I realized your boys killed Tommy Delcamino.”
There was a second of confusion in his eyes. “Nah, my boys ain’t killed nobody. That dumbass man was dead already.”
“Bullshit!”
He shoved the gun into my flesh so hard it lifted up my head. “Man, ain’t nobody talk to me like that. You hungry to die?”
In spite of the pressure, I managed to say, “Not anymore.”
That confused him again and he eased back a little.
“Look, I recognize Jamal’s voice. Your boys were there at that paving yard.”
My elegant friend smiled an expensive smile at me. “I never said they wasn’t. I said they ain’t killed nobody.”
“They ransacked my old house. Went into a place they shouldn’t have gone into and fucked it up. A sacred place to me and my family.”
He shook his head at me. “Weren’t my boys. I got no business at your house, man.”
I wasn’t sure I believed him, but I didn’t think I should argue the point. “Maybe not, but they shot me in the leg when they were at the paving yard.”
The smile ran away from his face. My guess was Jamal and Antwone hadn’t mentioned that to him. “Don’t change nothin’. You got something that belong to me. Now we gonna do this easy or hard?”
And in that moment it came to me that Tommy’s murder was just the second act to his son’s murder.
“By ‘hard,’ you mean the way you tortured TJ Delcamino to death?” I guessed I was talking a little too loudly to suit my friend holding the gun to my throat.
“Yo, you raise your voice to me again, I won’t be givin’ y’all a choice ’bout easy or hard. My boys’ll be all over your ass.”
“What do you need them for? You look like you could handle yourself just fine. What’d you fight as, super middleweight?”
I’d appealed to his vanity. “Uh-huh. Put on a pound or two since them days. But you ain’t worth gettin’ my hands all fucked up for.” Then he leaned in closer to me so that I could feel the warmth of his breath on my cheek. “And trus’ me when I tell you, y’all don’t ever want me dealin’ with you direct.” And when he pulled his head back, his eyes were as cold and blank and devoid of humanity as any eyes I’d ever looked into, and that was saying something.
“You know I’m Suffolk PD?”
He smiled again, but with only half his face. It never reached his eyes. “That s’posed to scare me?” He laughed. “I know all ’bout you. I found you here, ain’t I? Nah, Gus Murphy, cops don’t scare me none. You ain’t even on the job no more anyways.”
“You mind telling me what of yours I’m supposed to have?”
He shook his shaved head and made a clucking sound with his tongue. “Man, don’t be playin’ it that way. I don’t want to hurt you. I got sympathy for y’all. Be a shame for your ex and your girl to have to grieve you so soon afta losin’ your boy that way.”
I lost it and let go a short chopping right hand that landed flush on the left side of his face. But he didn’t shoot me. He took it. Shook it off. Nodded his head. Smiled. Lowered the Sig. Then something like a baseball bat hit me flush in the liver. I th
ought my guts had exploded. I’d never felt physical pain like that before. I was down on my hands and knees, nauseous. I could barely hold myself up for how his punch reverberated through me.
“Like I say, you got some balls on you, Gus. Some balls. Too bad y’all gonna make this tough on yourself. Jamal! Antwone!”
But there was no answer. No sound of footsteps. Nothing. I managed to swing my head around and look behind me, but nothing was moving and the only thing disturbing the silence was the muted voice of Billy Idol singing “Dancing with Myself” coming from the Full Flaps Lounge. When I stared up, I saw my friend was scanning the darkness, wondering from which corner of the night his trouble would come. He was swinging the Sig slowly from side to side . . . ready.
In the meantime, using the Escalade’s running board and door handle, I pulled myself up to my feet. I was pretty wobbly. My friend ignored me, understanding that I wasn’t the real threat. Then there were footsteps from behind him, coming upon him so quickly even he couldn’t react. His eyes got big with something that looked like fear and he dropped his Sig to the ground. He froze. Only the puffs of steamy breath coming from his mouth and nostrils hinted that he wasn’t made of onyx.
“You are putting hands on top of your head and getting on your knees, mister. You will do so now, please.”
It was Slava. And when the guy got on his knees, I saw that Slava was holding what looked to be Jamal’s Beretta to the back of my elegant friend’s head. Slava was sixty if a day, more burly than big. He had thin wisps of gray hair atop his ugly head and his eyes were a weary shade of faded blue. But I guessed I was going to have to reconfigure my assessment of him as a kindly old uncle.
“Are you okay, Gus? This man is hurting you?”
“I’m okay,” I lied, unsure of how Slava might react. I didn’t want to risk him pulling the trigger. “Where are his pals?”
Slava’s laugh was a series of snorts and gasps. “They are resting on sidewalk.” His Ws sounded like Vs so that “sidewalk” was “sidevalk.”
I picked up my elegant pal’s Sig. I was curious about how Slava had managed to convince Jamal and Antwone to rest on the sidewalk, but that would have to wait. I pointed the Sig at my friend, who’d remained silent and unmoving on his knees through the whole process.
Where It Hurts Page 9